Tag Archives: Federal Reserve

Dr. Ron Paul has been saying this for years, while most of the country sat in their stupor, claiming he was a kook, making fun of him, making fun of his supporters. Now as we sit back and watch this go around for the run to the President of the US, what do we see? A whole lot of Bernie Sanders supporters, who are basically claiming that the old Bernster deserves to be POTUS because of a few things he has in common with Ron Paul. What’s even worse? Bernie is calling for a very extreme form of socialism, and anyone with any sense at all knows that socialism needs to be implemented before full communism can take it’s form. Continue reading →

(Kent Hoover) The Small Business Administration has instituted a waiting list for its flagship 7(a) loans because the program hit its annual lending cap of $18.75 billion on Thursday.

SBA officials, lenders and small business groups are urging Congress to raise the program’s authorization to $23.5 billion in order to free up loans for small businesses. Demand for the program is high because the government-guaranteed loans are the primary source of long-term loans, which feature lower monthly payments, for small businesses.

This was the logic behind U.S. policy, and yet the government has paid ransoms to criminal organizations, such as drug cartels.Every Federal Reserve branch in the U.S. maintains a stash of bills to be used to pay ransoms. Corporations routinely take out ransom insurance for employees stationed abroad, and the F.B.I. even facilitates such payments. It’s only when the kidnappers are part of an acknowledged terrorist group that payments become illegal.

(Zero Hedge) The lack of faith in central bank trustworthiness is spreading. First Germany, then Holland, and Austria, and now – as we noted was possible previously – Texas has enacted a Bill to repatriate $1 billion of gold from The NY Fed’s vaults to a newly established state gold bullion depository…”People have this image of Texas as big and powerful … so for a lot of people, this is exactly where they would want to go with their gold,” and the Bill includes a section to prevent forced seizure from the Federal Government. Continue reading →

Anyone who wants to get to the truth behind the inflationary threats to their wealth should ignore everything the Central Banks say about inflation and look instead at their actions.

Worldwide gold demand in 2012 was another record high of $236.4 billion in the World Gold Council’s latest report. This was up 6% in value terms in the fourth quarter to $66.2 billion, the highest fourth quarter on record. Global gold demand in the fourth quarter of 2012 was up 4% to 1,195.9 tonnes.

Central bank buying for 2012 rose by 17% over 2011 to some 534.6 tonnes. As far as central bank gold buying, this was the highest level since 1964. Central bank purchases stood at 145 tonnes in the fourth quarter. That is up 9% from the fourth quarter of 2011, and the eighth consecutive quarter in which central banks were net purchasers of gol

Note… Central Banks, while talking down money printing and denying the presence of inflation, bought more Gold in 2012 that any year dating back to 1964. Indeed, However, since becoming net buyers of Gold in 2010, the Central Banks have been increasing their Gold purchases rapidly.

In 2010, Governments worldwide bought 77 tonnes of Gold. In 2011 it was 457 tonnes. And last year it was a whopping 535 tonnes. All told, they’ve accumulated 1,000 tonnes of Gold since 2Q09. At today’s price of $1600 per ounce, this stash is valued at over $56 billion.

The key issue here is not the amount ($56 billion in Gold purchases is nothing compared to the over $10 trillion in new money Central banks have printed since 2007), but the trend: Central Banks were net sellers of Gold for decades until 2010.

Other major investors are looking to get their hands on Gold… not the promise of Gold, but the actual metal.

Germany has the second largest Gold reserves in the world behind the US. Since the early ’80s, it has stored the majority of these reserves with the NY Fed (45% vs. 13% in London, 11% in Paris and the remaining 31% in Frankfurt).

With that in mind, everyone needs to be aware that last Monday Germany’s Bundesbank announced it will be moving a major portion of its reserves from the US and all of its reserves from France back to Frankfurt.

Nearly half of Germany’s gold reserves are held in a vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — billions of dollars worth of postwar geopolitical history squirreled away for safe keeping below the streets of Lower Manhattan.

Now the German central bank wants to make a big withdrawal — 300 tons in all.

On Wednesday, the Bundesbank said that it would begin moving some of the reserves, the second-largest stock in the world after that of the United States. The goal is to house more than 50 percent of German gold in Bundesbank vaults in Frankfurt by 2020, up from a little less than a third today, the bank said…

The new policy will include the complete withdrawal of 374 tons of German gold stored at the Banque de France in Paris, about 11 percent of the total. Bundesbank officials were quick to note that the decision was not a reflection of French trustworthiness. Rather, because France and Germany now share the euro, there is no need for reserves as insurance against currency crises.

This announcement came with the usual political statements that the decision had nothing to do with a lack of trust between the Bundesbank and the US Fed or Bank of France, but the message is obvious: Germany sees the writing on the wall and is moving to secure its Gold reserves.

The same goes for Texas:

Texas Republican State Representative Giovanni Capriglione authored the bill demanding state owned gold bars be returned to the Lone Star State. The legislation to pull $1 billion in gold reserves from a Federal Reserve vault in New York is supported by Governor Rick Perry.

The financial crisis in Cyprus which prompted a run on the bank and ultimately a closure of the financial institutions reportedly bolstered support for the Texas gold bar return bill. State Representative Capriglione had this to say about why he penned the bill:

“For us to have our own gold, a lot of the runs on the bank and those types of things, they happen because people are worried that there’s nothing there to back it up.”

Governor Perry stated that if Texas owns the gold, then no one else should be able to determine if the state can reclaim possession of the bars of precious metal. Representative Capriglione also noted that Texas is not interested in implementing its own gold standard. According to the Republican’s statements about the gold bars bill, he simply wants to bolster the state’s fiscally secure reputation. The Texas public servant also feels that such a solid financial persona would be beneficial in case an international of national fiscal crisis occurred.

The legislation notes the state does not merely want gold certificates from the Federal Reserve, they want the actual gold bars to store inside a planned Texas Bullion Depository. Moving $1 billion in gold bars from New York to Texas would be a huge task, one some are calling impractical. State Representative Capriglione suggested selling the gold currently housed inside the New York vault and then repurchasing the same amount in Texas.

Investors forget that the single most important role played by Central Banks is to maintain confidence in the system. For that reason they will NEVER admit inflation is a problem. But if inflation isn’t a problem, WHY ARE CENTRAL BANKS LOADING UP ON GOLD?

“I’m perplexed as to why gold is as low as it is. The largest central banks in the world have all moved to an unlimited printed ideology. If monetary policy is the only game in town, then we’re all in for a world of trouble.”

Oops. The Federal Reserve accidentally emailed the minutes from its March meeting to about 100 people a day early.

While no major news was expected to come from the minutes, they are nevertheless a key document that can move markets from time to time. Wall Street players often dig deep into the minutes for hints about when the central bank may pull back on its bond-buying policy or raise interest rates.

For that reason, the minutes are usually highly protected by the central bank and their release is supposed to be executed carefully.

A Fed spokesman told CNNMoney the mistake was “entirely accidental,” and it was a “human error,” not a technological one. The roughly 100 individuals on the list mostly included Congressional employees and employees of trade organizations. They received the minutes shortly after 2 p.m. on Tuesday.

At this point, it’s not clear whether any trading took placed based on the early release, but the Federal Reserve Board’s Inspector General will conduct an initial investigation of the error.

“We will be working with market regulators, the SEC and CFTC to insure they have the information they need to evaluate the incident,” a Fed spokesman said.

What the minutes said

The minutes contained very little new information about Fed policy. The main takeaway is most Fed members think the central bank should continue buying $85 billion a month in assets a month, at least through midyear.

But some members argued in favor of tapering down the purchases gradually while others didn’t see a need to decrease the purchases until the third quarter. Two said some purchases would probably continue into 2014.

The Federal Reserve’s current policy includes buying $45 billion in Treasuries and $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities each month. The main intent is to lower long-term interest rates. But this program, known as quantitative easing, is cited by some as a main reason the Dow and S&P 500 are now at record highs.

The central bank has also kept short-term interest rates near zero since 2008, with an aim to boost economic activity.

The Fed has said it plans to keep that rate near zero until the unemployment rate falls below 6.5% or inflation exceeds 2.5% a year. Most Fed officials don’t expect that to happen until 2015.

The minutes capture general themes from the Fed’s internal policy meetings, the last of which took place March 19-20. When Fed officials met at that point, it looked like the job market was gaining momentum.

Many economists still expect the Fed to start gradually decreasing its asset purchases later this year and end them completely in early 2014. But if the March jobs report marks the start to a weaker trend in hiring, that timetable could change.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said in March that he will be watching for signs of a “spring slump” in hiring, and other Fed officials have reiterated that sentiment since then. Speaking Wednesday morning on CNBC, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said he wants to get beyond a mid-year “swoon.”

“I think we need a few more months of really solid data and solid evidence that the recovery is moving ahead,” he said.

Did you know that there are thousands upon thousands of homeless people that are living underground beneath the streets of major U.S. cities? It is happening in Las Vegas, it is happening in New York City and it is even happening in Kansas City. As the economy crumbles, poverty in the United States is absolutely exploding and so is homelessness. In addition to the thousands of “tunnel people” living under the streets of America, there are also thousands that are living in tent cities, there are tens of thousands that are living in their vehicles and there are more than a million public school children that do not have a home to go back to at night. The federal government tells us that the recession “is over” and that “things are getting better”, and yet poverty and homelessness in this country continue to rise with no end in sight. So what in the world are things going to look like when the next economic crisis hits?

When I heard that there were homeless people living in a network of underground tunnels beneath the streets of Kansas City, I was absolutely stunned. I have relatives that live in that area. I never thought of Kansas City as one of the more troubled cities in the United States.

But according to the Daily Mail, police recently discovered a huge network of tunnels under the city that people had been living in…

Below the streets of Kansas City, there are deep underground tunnels where a group of vagrant homeless people lived in camps.

These so-called homeless camps have now been uncovered by the Kansas City Police, who then evicted the residents because of the unsafe environment.

Authorities said these people were living in squalor, with piles of garbage and dirty diapers left around wooded areas.

The saddest part is the fact that authorities found dirty diapers in the areas near these tunnels. That must mean that babies were being raised in that kind of an environment.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing is happening all over the nation. In recent years, the tunnel people of Las Vegas have received quite a bit of publicity all over the world. It has been estimated that more than 1,000 people live in the massive network of flood tunnels under the city…

But astonishingly, the 200 miles of flood tunnels are also home to 1,000 people who eke out a living in the strip’s dark underbelly.

Some, like Steven and his girlfriend Kathryn, have furnished their home with considerable care – their 400sq ft ‘bungalow’ boasts a double bed, a wardrobe and even a bookshelf.

Could you imagine living like that? Sadly, for an increasing number of Americans a “normal lifestyle” is no longer an option. Either they have to go to the homeless shelters or they have to try to eke out an existence on their own any way that they can.

In New York City, authorities are constantly trying to root out the people that live in the tunnels under the city and yet they never seem to be able to find them all. The following is from a New York Post article about the “Mole People” that live underneath New York City…

The homeless people who live down here are called Mole People. They do not, as many believe, exist in a separate, organized underground society. It’s more of a solitary existence and loose-knit community of secretive, hard-luck individuals.

The New York Post followed one homeless man known as “John Travolta” on a tour through the underground world. What they discovered was a world that is very much different from what most New Yorkers experience…

In the tunnels, their world is one of malt liquor, tight spaces, schizophrenic neighbors, hunger and spells of heat and cold. Travolta and the others eat fairly well, living on a regimented schedule of restaurant leftovers, dumped each night at different times around the neighborhood above his foreboding home.

Even as the Dow hits record high after record high, poverty in New York City continues to rise at a very frightening pace. Incredibly, the number of homeless people sleeping in the homeless shelters of New York City has increased by a whopping 19 percent over the past year.

In many of our major cities, the homeless shelters are already at maximum capacity and are absolutely packed night after night. Large numbers of homeless people are often left to fend for themselves.

That is one reason why we have seen the rise of so many tent cities.

Yes, the tent cities are still there, they just aren’t getting as much attention these days because they do not fit in with the “economic recovery” narrative that the mainstream media is currently pushing.

In fact, many of the tent cities are larger than ever. For example, you can check out a Reuters video about a growing tent city in New Jersey that was posted on YouTube at the end of March right here. A lot of these tent cities have now become permanent fixtures, and unfortunately they will probably become much larger when the next major economic crisis strikes.

But perhaps the saddest part of all of this is the massive number of children that are suffering night after night.

For the first time ever, more than a million public school children in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by 57 percentsince the 2006-2007 school year.

So if things are really “getting better”, then why in the world do we have more than a million public school children without homes?

These days a lot of families that have lost their homes have ended up living in their vehicles. The following is an excerpt from a 60 Minutes interview with one family that is living in their truck…

This is the home of the Metzger family. Arielle,15. Her brother Austin, 13. Their mother died when they were very young. Their dad, Tom, is a carpenter. And, he’s been looking for work ever since Florida’s construction industry collapsed. When foreclosure took their house, he bought the truck on Craigslist with his last thousand dollars. Tom’s a little camera shy – thought we ought to talk to the kids – and it didn’t take long to see why.

Pelley: How long have you been living in this truck?

Arielle Metzger: About five months.

Pelley: What’s that like?

Arielle Metzger: It’s an adventure.

Austin Metzger: That’s how we see it.

Pelley: When kids at school ask you where you live, what do you tell ‘em?

Austin Metzger: When they see the truck they ask me if I live in it, and when I hesitate they kinda realize. And they say they won’t tell anybody.

Arielle Metzger: Yeah it’s not really that much an embarrassment. I mean, it’s only life. You do what you need to do, right?

But after watching a news report or reading something on the Internet about these people we rapidly forget about them because they are not a part of “our world”.

Another place where a lot of poor people end up is in prison. In a previous article, I detailed how the prison population in the United States has been booming in recent years. If you can believe it, the United States now has approximately 25 percent of the entire global prison population even though it only has about 5 percent of the total global population.

And these days it is not just violent criminals that get thrown into prison. If you lose your job and get behind on your bills, you could be thrown into prison as well. The following is from a recent CBS News article…

Roughly a third of U.S. states today jail people for not paying off their debts, from court-related fines and fees to credit card and car loans, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Such practices contravene a 1983 United States Supreme Court ruling that they violate the Constitutions’s Equal Protection Clause.

Some states apply “poverty penalties,” such as late fees, payment plan fees and interest, when people are unable to pay all their debts at once. Alabama charges a 30 percent collection fee, for instance, while Florida allows private debt collectors to add a 40 percent surcharge on the original debt. Some Florida counties also use so-called collection courts, where debtors can be jailed but have no right to a public defender. In North Carolina, people are charged for using a public defender, so poor defendants who can’t afford such costs may be forced to forgo legal counsel.

The high rates of unemployment and government fiscal shortfalls that followed the housing crash have increased the use of debtors’ prisons, as states look for ways to replenish their coffers. Said Chettiar, “It’s like drawing blood from a stone. States are trying to increase their revenue on the backs of the poor.”

If you are poor, the United States can be an incredibly cold and cruel place. Mercy and compassion are in very short supply.

The middle class continues to shrink and poverty continues to grow with each passing year. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately one out of every six Americans is now living in poverty. And if you throw in those that are considered to be “near poverty”, that number becomes much larger. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income”.

But even as poverty grows, it seems like the hearts of those that still do have money are getting colder. Just check out what happened recently at a grocery store that was in the process of closing down in Augusta, Georgia…

Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the storeowner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank.

The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”

In fact, the employment crisis looks like it is starting to take another turn for the worse. The number of layoffs in the month of March was 30 percent higher than the same time a year ago.

Meanwhile, small businesses are indicating that hiring is about to slow down significantly. According to a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, small businesses in the United States are extremely pessimistic right now. The following is what Goldman Sachs had to say about this survey…

Components of the survey were consistent with the decline in headline optimism, as the net percent of respondents planning to hire fell to 0% (from +4%), those expecting higher sales fell to -4% (from +1%), and those reporting that it is a good time to expand ticked down to +4% (from +5%). The net percent of respondents expecting the economy to improve was unchanged at -28%, a very depressed level. However, on the positive side, +25% of respondents plan increased capital spending [ZH: With Alcoa CapEx spending at a 2 year low]. Small business owners continue to place poor sales, taxes, and red tape at the top of their list of business problems, as they have for the past several years.

So why aren’t our politicians doing anything to fix this?

For example, why in the world don’t they stop millions of our jobs from being sent out of the country?

Well, the truth is that they don’t think we have a problem. In fact, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson recently said that U.S. trade deficits “don’t matter”.

And since the last election, the White House has seemed to have gone into permanent party mode.

On Tuesday, another extravagant party will be held at the White House. It is being called “In Performance at the White House: Memphis Soul”, and it is going to include some of the biggest names in the music industry…

As the White House has previously announced, Justin Timberlake (who will be making his White House debut), Al Green, Ben Harper, Queen Latifah, Cyndi Lauper, Joshua Ledet, Sam Moore, Charlie Musselwhite, Mavis Staples, and others will be performing at the exclusive event.

And so who will be paying for all of this?

You and I will be. Even as the Obamas cry about all of the other “spending cuts” that are happening, they continue to blow millions of taxpayer dollars on wildly extravagant parties and vacations.

Overall, U.S. taxpayers will spend well over a billion dollars on the Obamas this year.

I wonder what the tunnel people that live under the streets of America think about that.

(NYUD) -Del. Bob Marshall did a little strategic name-dropping Thursday, and it had the desired effect.

For two years, the Prince William County Republican has been seeking a study of whether Virginia should adopt an alternative currency to replace the dollar in case the Federal Reserve System has a major meltdown.

His quest always ended in failure – until this year.

Presenting the latest version of his proposal (HJ590) to a subcommittee of the House Rules Committee, Marshall said his worry about a breakdown of the federal monetary system is no idle fear. There have been cyber attacks on banks, he said, and the Pentagon is preparing for economic warfare.

“My purpose is to have a Plan B,” he said, so Virginians would still be able to conduct commerce without using greenbacks.

Then he pulled out his trump card.

This year, he said, he has the support of Judy Shelton, an economist who happens to be a friend and neighbor of House Speaker William Howell, R-Stafford County, who chairs the Rules Committee. And the speaker himself has gotten behind the measure, Marshall added.

Then, with almost no discussion, the panel approved the bill on a 4-0 vote, advancing it to the full committee.

(RT) US Federal Reserve is reporting a major deposit withdrawal from the nation’s bank accounts. The financial system hasn’t seen such a massive fund outflow since 9/11 attacks.

The first week of January 2013 has seen $114 billion withdrawn from 25 of the US’ biggest banks, pushing deposits down to $5.37 trillion, according to the US Fed. Financial analysts suggest it could be down to the Transaction Account Guarantee insurance program coming to an end on December 31 last year and clients moving their money that is no longer insured by the government.

The program was introduced in the wake of the 2008 crisis in order to support the banking system. It provided insurance for around $1.5 trillion in non-interest-bearing accounts with a limit of $250,000. It was aimed at medium and small banks as the creators of the program believed bigger banks would cope with the crisis themselves.

So the current “fast pace” of withdrawal comes as a surprise to financial analysts because the deposits are slipping away from those banks which supposedly were safe. Experts expected savers in small and medium banks would turn to bigger players come December 31.

There are a number of reasons behind this unpredicted fund outflow. Some experts believe it has to do with the beginning of the year when the money is randomly needed here and there. Others have concluded the funds are getting down to business and being invested.

Another set of data from the US Federal Reserve shows some deposits may have moved within the banking system from one type of account to another.

(IntelHub) -Many people believe that the Federal Reserve is an organization that operates as a public service, there are not many out there who realize that this is a for profit business.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with providing a service and turning a profit, but there is something wrong with using the government to monopolize a vital aspect of society, forcing the whole society to use a particular service whether they like to or not.

It turns out that The Federal Reserve makes billions per year through this coercive monopoly, and this much activists and researchers have known for a long time. However, until now there has been very little hard evidence or sources to reference, which tell us exactly how much money they really do make. Recently, some numbers were revealed that can at least shed some light on a portion of their income, and these preliminary figures amount to at least $90 Billion per year.

“While leaders in Washington stare down the fiscal cliff, let’s not forget the fiscal fact that brought us to the edge: The annual U.S. government deficit of more than a trillion dollars. But through it all, one government-related entity has been hauling in record surpluses. New data capture the scope of profits at the U.S. Federal Reserve, estimated to be $90 billion this year.”

“The last five or six years their profits have roughly tripled,” says Allan Sloan, senior editor-at-large at Fortune Magazine.

According to Sloan, the Federal Reserve owes its success to its practice of buying securities with newly printed money.

“If you go out an buy $2 or $3 trillion of securities that pay interest and you don’t have to pay any interest on the money used to buy the securities, you make a lot of money,” says Sloan.

Not only that, but a great deal of the national debt is actually “owed” to the Fed, due to their charging of interest on every dollar that they print and loan to the US government.

It is likely that this revelation will be swept under the rug by the mainstream media, and it is also highly probable the $90 billion figure is merely scratching the surface.

(TheEconomicCollapse) – What a year 2012 has been! The mainstream media continues to tell us what a “great job” the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class. It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening. If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode. Just “tweaking” things slightly is not going to fix our economy. We need a fundamental change in direction. Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic “adjustment” that America has ever gone through. We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done. Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.

The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year. Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones. Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion. So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be “just fine”, just show them these numbers. They are a good summary of the problems that the U.S. economy is currently facing.

The following are 50 economic numbers from 2012 that are almost too crazy to believe…

#1 In December 2008, 31.6 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, a new all-time record of 47.7 million Americans are on food stamps. That number has increased by more than 50 percent over the past four years, and yet the mainstream media still has the gall to insist that “things are getting better”.

#3 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

#4 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all Americans have received money from a safety net program run by the federal government at some point in their lives.

#5 For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.

#6 Median household income in the U.S. has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.

#7 Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

#9 In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place.

#10 When you total up all working age Americans that do not have a job in America today, it comes to more than 100 million.

#11 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all small business owners in America “say they would not start a business today given what they know now and in the current environment.”

#26 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government. Back in 1983, that number was less than 30 percent.

#27 Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare. Overall, there are almost 80 different “means-tested welfare programs” that the federal government is currently running.

#28 When you account for all government transfer payments and all forms of government employment, more than half of all Americans are now at least partially financially dependent on the government.

#29 Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has increased by nearly 8.5 million. Something seems really “off” about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only rose by about 2.5 million.

#30 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

#31 According to USA Today, many Americans have actually seen their water bills triple over the past 12 years.

#32 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

#33 Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents.

#34 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.

#35 At this point, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States are good jobs.

#36 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.

#42 More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as will be sold in 2012.

#43 If you can believe it, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.

#44 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

#45 Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion. That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.

#46 The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#47 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

#48 The U.S. tax code is now more than 3.8 million words long. If you took all of William Shakespeare’s works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long.

#49 According to the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banking havens such as the Cayman Islands.

#71 Medicare is also growing by leaps and bounds. As I wrote about recently, it is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.

#72 Thanks to our foolish politicians (including Obama), Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.

#73 Amazingly, the U.S. national debt is now up to 16.3 trillion dollars. When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.

#74 During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about as much debt as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.

#75 Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was originally created back in 1913.

Please share this article with as many people as you can. Time is running out, and we need to wake up as many people as possible.

(Excerpted from Chapter 19: The Eight Families: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf… Part two of a five-part series)

In 1789 Alexander Hamilton became the first Treasury Secretary of the United States. Hamilton was one of many Founding Fathers who were Freemasons. He had close relations with the Rothschild family which owns the Bank of England and leads the European Freemason movement. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Ethan Allen, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Brown and Roger Sherman were all Masons.

Roger Livingston helped Sherman and Franklin write the Declaration of Independence. He gave George Washington his oaths of office while he was Grand Master of the New York Grand Lodge of Freemasons. Washington himself was Grand Master of the Virginia Lodge. Of the General Officers in the Revolutionary Army, thirty-three were Masons. This was highly symbolic, since 33rd Degree Masons become Illuminated. [1]

Populist founding fathers led by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine – none of whom were Masons – wanted to completely severe ties with the British Crown, but were overruled by the Masonic faction led by Washington, Hamilton and Grand Master of the St. Andrews Lodge in Boston General Joseph Warren, who wanted to “defy Parliament but remain loyal to the Crown”. St. Andrews Lodge was the hub of New World Masonry and began issuing Knights Templar Degrees in 1769. [2]

All US Masonic lodges are to this day warranted by the British Crown, whom they serve as a global intelligence and counterrevolutionary subversion network. Their most recent initiative is the Masonic Child Identification Program (CHIP). According toWikipedia, the CHIP programs allow parents the opportunity to create a kit of identifying materials for their child, free of charge. The kit contains a fingerprint card, a physical description, a video, computer disk, or DVD of the child, a dental imprint, and a DNA sample.

The First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in 1774 under the Presidency of Peyton Randolph, who succeeded Washington as Grand Master of the Virginia Lodge. The Second Continental Congress convened in 1775 under the Presidency of Freemason John Hancock. Peyton’s brother William succeeded him as Virginia Lodge Grand Master and became the leading proponent of centralization and federalism at the First Constitutional Convention in 1787. The federalism at the heart of the US Constitution is identical to the federalism laid out in the Freemason’s Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723. William Randolph became the nation’s first Attorney General and Secretary of State under George Washington. His family returned to England loyal to the Crown. John Marshall, the nation’s first Supreme Court Justice, was also a Mason. [3]

All US Masonic lodges are to this day warranted by the British Crown,
whom they serve as a global intelligence and counterrevolutionary subversion network.

When Benjamin Franklin journeyed to France to seek financial help for American revolutionaries, his meetings took place at Rothschild banks. He brokered arms sales via German Mason Baron von Steuben. His Committees of Correspondence operated through Freemason channels and paralleled a British spy network. In 1776 Franklin became de facto Ambassador to France. In 1779 he became Grand Master of the French Neuf Soeurs (Nine Sisters) Lodge, to which John Paul Jones and Voltaire belonged. Franklin was also a member of the more secretive Royal Lodge of Commanders of the Temple West of Carcasonne, whose members included Frederick Prince of Whales. While Franklin preached temperance in the US, he cavorted wildly with his Lodge brothers in Europe. Franklin served as Postmaster General from the 1750’s to 1775 – a role traditionally relegated to British spies. [4]

With Rothschild financing Alexander, Hamilton founded two New York banks, including Bank of New York. [5] He died in a gun battle with Aaron Burr, who founded Bank of Manhattan with Kuhn Loeb financing. Hamilton exemplified the contempt which the Eight Families hold towards common people, once stating, “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the well born, the others the mass of the people… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge and determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share of government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.”[6]

Hamilton was only the first in a series of Eight Families cronies to hold the key position of Treasury Secretary. In recent times Kennedy Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon came from Dillon Read (now part of UBS Warburg). Nixon Treasury Secretaries David Kennedy and William Simon came from Continental Illinois Bank (now part of Bank of America) and Salomon Brothers (now part of Citigroup), respectively. Carter Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal came from Goldman Sachs, Reagan Treasury Secretary Donald Regan came from Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America), Bush Sr. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady came from Dillon Read (UBS Warburg) and both Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Bush Jr. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came from Goldman Sachs. Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner worked at Kissinger Associates and the New York Fed.

Thomas Jefferson argued that the United States needed a publicly-owned central bank so that European monarchs and aristocrats could not use the printing of money to control the affairs of the new nation. Jefferson extolled, “A country which expects to remain ignorant and free…expects that which has never been and that which will never be.” There is scarcely a King in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh – get first all the people’s money, then all their lands and then make them and their children servants forever…banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy.” Jefferson watched as the Euro-banking conspiracy to control the United States unfolded, weighing in, “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day, but a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period, unalterable through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery”. [7]

Thomas Jefferson argued that the United States needed a publicly-owned central bank so that European monarchs and aristocrats could not use the printing of money to control the affairs of the new nation.

But the Rothschild-sponsored Hamilton’s arguments for a private US central bank carried the day. In 1791 the Bank of the United States (BUS) was founded, with the Rothschilds as main owners. The bank’s charter was to run out in 1811. Public opinion ran in favor of revoking the charter and replacing it with a Jeffersonian public central bank. The debate was postponed as the nation was plunged by the Euro-bankers into the War of 1812. Amidst a climate of fear and economic hardship, Hamilton’s bank got its charter renewed in 1816.

Old Hickory, Honest Abe & Camelot

In 1828 Andrew Jackson took a run at the US Presidency. Throughout his campaign he railed against the international bankers who controlled the BUS. Jackson ranted, “You are a den of vipers. I intend to expose you and by Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people understood the rank injustices of our moneyand banking system there would be a revolution before morning.”

Jackson won the election and revoked the bank’s charter stating, “The Act seems to be predicated on an erroneous idea that the present shareholders have a prescriptive right to not only the favor, but the bounty of the government…for their benefit does this Act exclude the whole American people from competition in the purchase of this monopoly. Present stockholders and those inheriting their rights as successors be established a privileged order, clothed both with great political power and enjoying immense pecuniary advantages from their connection with government. Should its influence be concentrated under the operation of such an Act as this, in the hands of a self-elected directory whose interests are identified with those of the foreign stockholders, will there not be cause to tremble for the independence of our country in war…controlling our currency, receiving our public monies and holding thousands of our citizens independence, it would be more formidable and dangerous than the naval and military power of the enemy. It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government for selfish purposes…to make the rich richer and more powerful. Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by acts of Congress. I have done my duty to this country.”[8]

Populism prevailed and Jackson was re-elected. In 1835 he was the target of an assassination attempt. The gunman was Richard Lawrence, who confessed that he was, “in touch with the powers in Europe”. [9]

Still, in 1836 Jackson refused to renew the BUS charter. Under his watch the US national debt went to zero for the first and last time in our nation’s history. This angered the international bankers, whose primary income is derived from interest payments on debt. BUS President Nicholas Biddle cut off funding to the US government in 1842, plunging the US into a depression. Biddle was an agent for the Paris-based Jacob Rothschild. [10]

“You are a den of vipers. I intend to expose you and by Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people understood the rank injustices of our money and banking system there would be a revolution before morning.” Andrew Jackson

The Mexican War was simultaneously sprung on Jackson. A few years later the Civil War was unleashed, with London bankers backing the Union and French bankers backing the South. The Lehman family made a fortune smuggling arms to the south and cotton to the north. By 1861 the US was $100 million in debt. New President Abraham Lincoln snubbed the Euro-bankers again, issuing Lincoln Greenbacks to pay Union Army bills.

The Rothschild-controlled Times of Londonwrote, “If that mischievous policy, which had its origins in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed, or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.” [11]

The Euro-banker-written Hazard Circularwas exposed and circulated throughout the country by angry populists. It stated, “The great debt that capitalists will see is made out of the war and must be used to control the valve of money. To accomplish this government bonds must be used as a banking basis. We are now awaiting Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase to make that recommendation. It will not allow Greenbacks to circulate as money as we cannot control that. We control bonds and through them banking issues”.

The 1863 National Banking Act reinstated a private US central bank and Chase’s war bonds were issued. Lincoln was re-elected the next year, vowing to repeal the act after he took his January 1865 oaths of office. Before he could act, he was assassinated at the Ford Theatre by John Wilkes Booth. Booth had major connections to the international bankers. His granddaughter wrote This One Mad Act, which details Booth’s contact with “mysterious Europeans” just before the Lincoln assassination.

Following the Lincoln hit, Booth was whisked away by members of a secret society known as Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC). KGC had close ties to the French Society of Seasons, which produced Karl Marx. KGC had fomented much of the tension that caused the Civil War and President Lincoln had specifically targeted the group. Booth was a KGC member and was connected through Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin to the House of Rothschild. Benjamin fled to England after the Civil War. [12]

Nearly a century after Lincoln was assassinated for issuing Greenbacks, President John F. Kennedy found himself in the Eight Families’ crosshairs. Kennedy had announced a crackdown on off-shore tax havens and proposed increases in tax rates on large oil and mining companies. He supported eliminating tax loopholes that benefitted the super-rich. His economic policies were publicly attacked by Fortune magazine, the Wall Street Journaland both David and Nelson Rockefeller. Even Kennedy’s own Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, who came from the UBS Warburg-controlled Dillon Read investment bank, voiced opposition to the JFK proposals. [13]

Kennedy’s fate was sealed in June 1963 when he authorized the issuance of more than $4 billion in United States Notes by his Treasury Department in an attempt to circumvent the high interest rate usury of the private Federal Reserve international banker crowd. The wife of Lee Harvey Oswald, who was conveniently gunned down by Jack Ruby before Ruby himself was shot, told author A. J. Weberman in 1994, “The answer to the Kennedy assassination is with the Federal Reserve Bank. Don’t underestimate that. It’s wrong to blame it on Angleton and the CIA per seonly. This is only one finger on the same hand. The people who supply the money are above the CIA”. [14]

Fueled by incoming President Lyndon Johnson’s immediate escalation of the Vietnam War, the US sank further into debt. Its citizens were terrorized into silence. If they could kill the President they could kill anyone.

The House of Rothschild

The Dutch House of Orange founded the Bank of Amsterdam in 1609 as the world’s first central bank. Prince William of Orange married into the English House of Windsor, taking King James II’s daughter Mary as his bride. The Orange Order Brotherhood, which recently fomented Northern Ireland Protestant violence, put William III on the English throne where he ruled both Holland and Britain. In 1694 William III teamed up with the UK aristocracy to launch the private Bank of England.

The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street- as the Bank of England is known- is surrounded by thirty foot walls. Three floors beneath it the third largest stock of gold bullion in the world is stored. [15]

The Rothschilds and their inbred Eight Families partners gradually came to control the Bank of England. The daily London gold “fixing” occurred at the N. M. Rothschild Bank until 2004. As Bank of England Deputy Governor George Blunden put it, “Fear is what makes the bank’s powers so acceptable. The bank is able to exert its influence when people are dependent on us and fear losing their privileges or when they are frightened.”[16]

“If they could kill the President they could kill anyone.”

Mayer Amschel Rothschild sold the British government German Hessian mercenaries to fight against American Revolutionaries, diverting the proceeds to his brother Nathan in London, where N.M. (Nathan and Mayer) Rothschild & Sons was established. Mayer was a serious student of Cabala and launched his fortune on money embezzled from William IX- royal administrator of the Hesse-Kassel region and a prominent Freemason.

Rothschild-controlled Barings bankrolled the Chinese opium and African slave trades. It financed the Louisiana Purchase. When several states defaulted on its loans, Barings bribed Daniel Webster to make speeches stressing the virtues of loan repayment. The states held their ground, so the House of Rothschild cut off the money spigot in 1842, plunging the US into a deep depression. It was often said that the wealth of the Rothschilds depended on the bankruptcy of nations. Mayer Amschel Rothschild once said, “I care not who controls a nation’s political affairs, so long as I control her currency”.

War didn’t hurt the family fortune either. The House of Rothschild financed the Prussian War, the Crimean War and the British attempt to seize the Suez Canal from the French. Nathan Rothschild made a huge financial bet on Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, while also funding the Duke of Wellington’s peninsular campaignagainstNapoleon. Both the Mexican War and the Civil War were goldmines for the family.

One Rothschild family biography mentions a London meeting where an “International Banking Syndicate” decided to pit the American North against the South as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once stated, “The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War. These bankers were afraid that the United States…would upset their financial domination over the world. The voice of the Rothschilds prevailed.” Rothschild biographer Derek Wilson says the family was the official European banker to the US government and strong supporters of the Bank of the United States. [17]

Family biographer Niall Ferguson notes a “substantial and unexplained gap” in private Rothschild correspondence between 1854-1860. He says all copies of outgoing letters written by the London Rothschilds during this Civil War period “were destroyed at the orders of successive partners”. [18]

French and British troops had, at the height of the Civil War, encircled the US. The British sent 11,000 troops to Crown-controlled Canada, which gave safe harbor to Confederate agents. France’s Napoleon III installed Austrian Hapsburg family member Archduke Maximilian as his puppet emperor in Mexico, where French troops massed on the Texas border. Only an 11th-hour deployment of two Russian warship fleets by US ally Czar Alexander II in 1863 saved the United States from re-colonization. [19]

That same year the Chicago Tribune blasted, “Belmont (August Belmont was a US Rothschild agent and had a Triple Crown horse race named in his honor) and the Rothschilds…who have been buying up Confederate war bonds.”

Salmon Rothschild said of a deceased President Lincoln, “He rejects all forms of compromise. He has the appearance of a peasant and can only tell barroom stories.” Baron Jacob Rothschild was equally flattering towards the US citizenry. He once commented to US Minister to Belgium Henry Sanford on the over half a million Americans who died during the Civil War, “When your patient is desperately sick, you try desperate measures, even to bloodletting.” Salmon and Jacob were merely carrying forth a family tradition. A few generations earlier Mayer Amschel Rothschild bragged of his investment strategy, “When the streets of Paris are running in blood, I buy”. [20]

French and British troops had, at the height of the Civil War, encircled the US. The British sent 11,000 troops to Crown-controlled Canada, which gave safe harbor to Confederate agents.

Mayer Rothschild’s sons were known as the Frankfurt Five. The eldest – Amschel – ran the family’s Frankfurt bank with his father, while Nathan ran London operations. Youngest son Jacob set up shop in Paris, while Salomon ran the Vienna branch and Karl was off to Naples. Author Frederick Morton estimates that by 1850 the Rothschilds were worth over $10 billion. [21] Some researchers believe that their fortune today exceeds $100 trillion.

The Warburgs, Kuhn Loebs, Goldman Sachs, Schiffs and Rothschilds have intermarried into one big happy banking family. The Warburg family- which controls Deutsche Bank and BNP–tied up with the Rothschilds in 1814 in Hamburg, while Kuhn Loeb powerhouse Jacob Schiff shared quarters with Rothschilds in 1785. Schiff immigrated to America in 1865. He joined forces with Abraham Kuhn and married Solomon Loeb’s daughter. Loeb and Kuhn married each others sisters and the Kuhn Loeb dynasty was consummated. Felix Warburg married Jacob Schiff’s daughter. Two Goldman daughters married two sons of the Sachs family, creating Goldman Sachs. In 1806 Nathan Rothschild married the oldest daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, a leading financier in London. [22] Thus, Merrill Lynch super-bull Abby Joseph Cohen and Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen are likely descended from Rothschilds.

Today the Rothschild’s control a far-flung financial empire, which includes majority stakes in most world central banks. The Edmond de Rothschild clan owns the Banque Privee SA in Lugano, Switzerland and the Rothschild Bank AG of Zurich. The family of Jacob Lord Rothschild owns the powerful Rothschild Italiain Milan. They are founding members of the exclusive $10 trillion Club of the Isles – which controls corporate giants Royal Dutch Shell, Imperial Chemical Industries, Lloyds of London, Unilever, Barclays, Lonrho, Rio Tinto Zinc, BHP Billiton and Anglo American DeBeers. It dominates the world supply of petroleum, gold, diamonds, and many other vital raw materials. [23]

The Club of the Isles provides capital for George Soros’ Quantum Fund NV – which made a killing in 1998-99 destroying the currencies of Thailand, Indonesia and Russia. Soros was a major shareholder at George W. Bush’s Harken Energy. Quantum NV operates from the Dutch island of Curacao, in the shadow of recently shuttered Royal Dutch/Shell and Exxon Mobil refineries. Curacao was recently cited by an OECD Task Force on Money Laundering as a major drug money laundering nation. The Club of Isles is led by the Rothschilds and includes Queen Elizabeth II and other wealthy European aristocrats and Black Nobility. Fugitive Swiss financier and Mossad cutout Marc Rich, whose business interests were recently taken over by the Russian mafia Alfa Group, is also part of the Soros network. [24]

Ties to drug money are nothing new to the Rothschilds. N. M. Rothschild & Sons was at the epicenter of the Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI) scandal, but escaped the limelight when a warehouse full of documents conveniently burned to the ground around the time Rothschild-controlled Bank of England shut BCCI down.

Recent Rothschild endeavors include the backing of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, control over Blackstone Group (see “…The 911 Short Selling Financial Scam”), and the takeover of giant Swiss oil trader Glencore.

Perhaps the largest repository for Rothschild wealth today is Rothschilds Continuation Holdings AG – a secretive Swiss-based bank holding company. By the late 1990s scions of the Rothschild global empire were Barons Guy and Elie de Rothschild in France and Lord Jacob and Sir Evelyn Rothschild in Britain. [25]

Evelyn was chairman of the Economistand a director at DeBeers and IBM UK.

Jacob backed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California gubernatorial campaign. He took control of Khodorkovsky’s YUKOS oil shares just before the Russian government arrested him. In 2010 Jacob joined Rupert Murdoch in a shale oil extraction partnership in Israel through Genie Energy – a subsidiary of IDT Corporation. [26]

Within months, Sarah Palin had hired former IDT executive Michael Glassner as her chief of staff. [27] Was Palin the failed Rothschild choice for 2012?

Next Week – The Federal Reserve Cartel Part III

Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries and Das Kartell der Federal Reserve. Subscriptions to his Left Hookblog are FREE at www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

(americanthinker.com) The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an imprint of the UN, is holding its World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) from December 3-14, 2012. The stated purpose of the WCIT is to update the UN’s “global treaty” on telecommunications to deal more directly and comprehensively with the internet. Knowing who controls the UN, it is not hard to see that a primary aim of the updated “treaty” will be to give credence to the regulation and monitoring of online activity in ways that are desirable to the (authoritarian) majority of member states.

Here is a portion of the ITU’s official explanation of the need for a new regulatory regime, in its Resolution 146:

[T]he International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) were last amended in Melbourne in 1988.

[T]he international telecommunications environment has significantly evolved, both from the technical and policy perspectives, and… it continues to evolve rapidly.

[A]dvances in technology have resulted in an increased use of IP-enabled infrastructure and relevant applications presenting both opportunities and challenges for ITU Member States and Sector Members.

[I]n order for ITU to maintain its pre-eminent role in global telecommunications, it must continue to demonstrate its capacity to respond adequately to the rapidly changing telecommunication environment.

[I]t is important to ensure that the ITRs [International Telecommunications Regulations] are reviewed and, if deemed appropriate, revised and updated in a timely manner in order to facilitate cooperation and coordination among Member States and to reflect accurately the relations between Member States, Sector Members, administrations and recognized operating agencies.

In case you missed a few classes of Regulatory Bureaucracy Speak 101, please allow me to translate:

Since we last updated our global telecommunications regulations, the internet, operating in a relatively unregulated environment, has grown by leaps and bounds, as human productive endeavors when left unregulated have an annoying tendency to do. Therefore, in order to keep this wildly successful communications network from getting any farther ahead of our regulatory apparatus, it is time to develop a strong, binding framework to limit internet growth, use, and activity in ways deemed necessary by those UN member states, such as China, Russia, and Iran, that are opposed on principle to unrestricted international communication, on the grounds that it tends to foster an informed and rebellious population.

In sum, authoritarian regimes with a vested interest in limiting public access to the outside world, or monitoring and censoring communications for “sensitive” content, are beginning to question whether the ITU is a sufficient guarantor of their control over their inmates with regard to global communication. If we do not act now to “demonstrate our capacity to respond adequately,” our “pre-eminent role in global telecommunications” — i.e., our role as facilitator of the statist status quo — will be challenged. In other words, if Vladimir thinks we are not serving his interests anymore, he will get angry, and no one wants to see Vladimir angry.

Is this translation of mine all just a lot of conservative fear-mongering about an innocent UN agency going about its daily business of fostering “supportive, transparent, pro-competitive, and predictable policies,” as Resolution 146 says?

Well, one easy way to check on that would be to read through the WCIT meeting’s official agenda. Unfortunately, that agenda, though linked on the ITU website, is password-protected to restrict access to members of the global bureaucracy. Specifically, the agenda may officially be read only by those government administrators, relevant apparatchiks, and contributing academics who are members of the Telecommunication Information Exchange Service. Yes, that is TIES — you could not invent a more suitable acronym for the “information service” of a global regulatory agency.

Internet users and providers, including even some, such as Google, that have a spotty history of resisting government encroachments into their industry, are expressing grave concerns about the ITU’s intentions. However, the ITU’s secretary-general, Hamadoun I. Touré, seeks to reassure us that this meeting of the UN’s telecommunications regulatory agency has nothing to do with regulating communication. Asked on Al-Jazeera why, given the extraordinary success of the internet as an unregulated domain, the ITU is choosing to write regulations now, he said:

The ITRs that is going to take place in Dubai is not about that. The ITRs is not about internet regulation. I’m very much surprised that all the debate is about this. The ITRs is revising the 1988 treaty that set the stage for the information society we are in today. But at the time, in 1988, it was only telephone communications, mainly, and back then, the settlement between operators was based on time, distance, and location. Today, we have a very significant growth of voice, video, and data, and therefore there is a need to fine tune the business model so that there is more investment in the infrastructure, to cope with the exponential growth in voice, video, and data traffic…. It’s not about internet freedom. Nobody today would dare to go against the freedom of the internet.

Lesson One on how to recognize a liar: if absolutely everything a man says is provably untrue, he is probably lying. (Merely ignorant people speak the truth occasionally, just by accident.)

“The ITRs” — that is, the International Communications Regulations — are “not about regulation.” So when we read, as in Resolution 146 above, that the International Telecommunications Regulations must be “revised and updated in a timely manner,” this revision and updating (of “Regulations”) is somehow unrelated to regulation. Well, that’s comforting.

The purpose of this conference — which the chief regulator, cutting to the chase, does not refer to by its actual name (WCIT), but by its primary objective, the ITRs that will be produced there — is to revise “the 1988 treaty that set the stage for the information society we are in today.” What a perfect self-revelation of the power-mad soul of a globalist regulator. The UN treaty on telecommunications, Touré claims, “set the stage” for the internet revolution in mass communications. Brilliant researchers, technological whiz kids, and adventurous entrepreneurs did not make it happen; UN bureaucrats did.

And we must put this absurd self-aggrandizement in the context of Touré’s very next sentence: “But at the time, in 1988, it was only telephone communications, mainly.” So the 1988 UN regulations “set the stage” for the internet boom, even though they had nothing to do with the internet. To be fair, this statement is undoubtedly true, though not in a way that Touré would ever concede: it was indeed the lack of UN regulations regarding the internet that made its exponential growth possible.

And this unfettered growth, of course — the sense that the internet is expanding “out of control” — is precisely the “challenge” that the new ITRs will be designed to address. Note, as well, how reminiscent Touré’s words are of another famous anti-freedom globalist, who, in his well-known “You didn’t build that” remarks, offered the following:

The internet didn’t get created on its own; government research created the internet, so that all the companies could make money off the internet.

By “on its own,” in that sentence, President Obama means “by individuals.” His point, like the ITU secretary-general’s, is that coercive regulatory authorities are ultimately responsible for the existence and success of the internet, as they are responsible for the existence and success of everything. This makes government the ultimate proprietor of all things, thus authorizing government to insert itself into these things at its own discretion.

Another Obamaesque point from Touré: the development of new communications technology creates “a need to fine tune the business model so that there is more investment in the infrastructure.” Market forces, you see, could never develop “infrastructure” to meet the needs of business expansion — rather, government, observing current conditions, must determine what people need, and make or arrange the appropriate “investments” to provide it. Again, this reinforces the notion of government as sole proprietor of the underlying conditions of commerce — that is, of the market itself. Government creates the terms and conditions, and then “allows” people to carry out their business on its well-regulated turf. The “free market,” the roads, the internet — all of these are, in the authoritarian’s view, “infrastructure,” and we all know that “infrastructure” is in the public domain. The need for “infrastructure” is now the left’s euphemistic argument for government regulation of everything.

The best part of Touré’s lying clinic, however, is saved for last: “Nobody today would dare to go against the freedom of the internet.” If a sixth grade naïf said such a thing, a responsible adult would smile kindly, and then gently explain that there are, sadly, many people in the world who do not believe men should be free. If the chief regulator of the UN’s telecommunications agency says it, you should feel like the humans in the movie Mars Attacks as the aliens recite their memorized English sentence — “Don’t run, we are your friends” — while zapping everyone in sight.

The UN agenda is dominated by national governments that certainly would, and do, dare to “go against the freedom of the internet.” (Ask a Chinese exchange student if she has a Facebook account, and see what response you get. Actually, don’t ask — those kids don’t need any added fear in their lives.) Of course Touré knows this. His explicit denial of the obvious proves him a (bad) liar. “Freedom of the internet,” as defined by the UN, has precisely the same validity and purpose as the word “Democratic” in the name Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

So what is this all about? It is often said that the first task in a modern military occupation is to take control of the means of mass communication, thereby to control the dissemination of information. The internet, by virtue of its having spread throughout the world so quickly, and of its being largely immune to national boundaries, creates a special problem for authoritarian governments which are, in effect, occupying forces in their own nations.

Certain governments have taken many steps to curtail internet activity within their own borders, of course. The problem is that the very free nature of the internet itself tends to shine a bright spotlight on the oppressiveness of such national policies. Far preferable for such suppressors of speech, then, would be an “international treaty” reached by “global consensus” that creates a system of loopholes for the suppression of speech on grounds of “national security” and the “prevention of foreign interference in a sovereign nation’s political process.”

In short, suppression of undesirable political speech, both within and between nations, would be much easier and less subject to scrutiny if it could be undertaken with the imprimatur of a UN treaty full of deliberately vague language about “protecting the integrity of a nation’s self-determination,” for example. Furthermore, once such a treaty — i.e., set of regulations — becomes the agreed upon standard for all or most nations, its euphemisms will begin to sound more palatable and reasonable to an inattentive public. (“After all, it isn’t right that foreigners should be stirring up civil discord and anti-government sentiment, is it?”) Before you know it, today’s critics of the ITU’s agenda will be echoing John Boehner’s post-election capitulations on ObamaCare — “it’s the law of the land.”

No surprise, then, that the main impetus behind the implementation of new regulations, and the granting of greater authority to the ITU itself, comes from Russia and China. (See Declan McCullagh’s observations on this threat here, and L. Gordon Crovitz’ Wall Street Journal piece here.) Online fraud, spam, and issues of protecting public morals will all be used as convenient cover for creating international authority for national authoritarianism.

It seems likely that the new ITRs — ushered in under the guise of modernizing “infrastructure” — will have as their main purpose and effect the whitewashing of despotic suppression of free speech, monitoring of users, and restriction of users’ access to information not approved for dissemination by the state. These methods are already used by some governments without (official) UN approval. The formal go-ahead from UN headquarters, however, will make the job of crushing internet age resistance movements (think of Iran’s Green Revolution) much easier, by allowing the oppressive regime to file formal grievances against groups or governments that it deems to be violating its national sovereignty or undermining its political system.

This quiet UN takeover of the internet is the important first step in a new kind of occupation. The globalists, with the help of the re-elected Obama administration, are going to move forward quickly with their plans for what Al Gore and Herman van Rompuy call “global governance.” A key part of this process is the reduction of the world’s last defense against authoritarianism — the United States of America — to the status of just another mild-mannered vote at the UN. Enter Barack Obama, with his hyper-conciliation to the Muslim Brotherhood, his promise to Vladimir Putin to finish dismantling America’s defenses after his re-election, and his remaking of a prosperous constitutional republic as an economically doomed leftist regulatory state.

Just as hyper-regulation within a nation subverts representative government, by creating a panoply of bureaucratic directives that supervene upon changing electoral tides, so international hyper-regulation will have the effect of nullifying any transnational voice of unified dissent — specifically, any voice speaking on behalf of the free exchange of ideas.

The range of speech, both with regard to content and dissemination, will be curtailed by the ITU’s proposed regulations. That will be the point of these regulations. They will help authoritarians preserve their power, prevent the oppressed from organizing from a distance, and restrict the much needed influx of moral support from abroad.

Now, Mr. Obama, if you will just sign one more executive order, Agenda 21 in its entirety will become “the law of the land,” and the forced migration may proceed — gently at first, as we don’t want to startle anyone. But don’t worry, if the objections get too boisterous, we can always assert the national security provisions of the International Telecommunications Regulations to tamp things down a little. Those ITRs are proving very effective for normalizing conditions in China, Russia, and Iran. And your Department of Homeland Security has already anticipated this eventuality by introducing into its guidelines on domestic terrorism language identifying people who revere liberty as potential security threats.

In any case, as November 6 proved, at least 140 million American adults can be effectively subdued by repeatedly chanting, “Don’t run, we are your friends.”

(IBITimes) -The media and various financial analysts gave Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke high marks Tuesday for delivering a wide-ranging speech on what exactly ails the U.S. economy.

But it seems most missed the most crucial part of Bernanke’s appearance: the one where he claimed to have awesome mind powers that could force the banking sector to do his bidding.

To give credit where due, the central banker did give a lucid reading of what’s holding back a robust recovery, and of what needs to be done in most cases.

The Fed head, speaking in Midtown Manhattan to the Economic Club of New York, went through all the post-recession “headwinds” the central bank has been discussing over the past year or so. The effect of state and local budget cuts on household finance, the increased level of uncertainty due to developments in Europe and Washington, and the extreme risk aversion by investment firms all were noted. The depressed state of the housing market and the overly tight standards banks seem to have adopted in spite of Fed inducements to the contrary also made the chairman’s list.

In fact, Bernanke was emphatic on the last point, noting, “lenders have maintained tight terms and condition on mortgage loans, even for potential borrowers with relatively good credit,” saying there was no good reason for the banks to be doing so.

“While some tightening of the terms of mortgage credit was certainly an appropriate response to the earlier excesses, the pendulum appears to have swung too far, restraining the pace of recovery in the housing sector,” Bernanke explained.

But while Bernanke made a convincing case that, essentially, the banks are holding us back, he sputtered and equivocated in trying to explain what the Fed could do about it, and offered only a scattershot answer as to why the central bank hasn’t done much.

In response to a post-speech question by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, who asked what tools the Fed had used to make the banks loosen lending standards, Bernanke said the Fed’s loose monetary policy could be counted as such a tool, since it allowed the banks to arbitrage the low-interest-rate environment and make record profits, something that eventually would lead financiers to lend.

“As the profitability of mortgage lending goes up [due to the low interest banks can borrow at], we will see banks” begin to ease lending standards, Bernanke explained.

Bernanke, perhaps realizing the optics of having just justified making bankers rich so that, maybe, eventually, they’ll do their part in helping the rest of the economy out, then added the Fed had “regulatory, supervisory, and analytical” capabilities that it had deployed to tackle the issue.

He suggested, for example, that the Fed had used its supervisory and regulatory power over the banking industry “at the margins” to help the housing market, giving as an example cases where the Fed ostensibly steered banks to execute short sales rather than foreclosures on distressed mortgage debt.

But seemingly unconvinced by his own answer, Bernanke fell back to emphasizing his secret weapon: his awe-inspiring brain. Repeating several times that this tool was not to be underestimated, Bernanke said that while not necessarily directly addressing the issue, the Fed “had a lot of influence from the analytical, intellectual point of view.”

“We’ve been influential in talking to other agencies, talking to the Congress in providing ideas and approaches,” Bernanke said.

To summarize for those who weren’t keeping track: The world’s most powerful central banker said Tuesday the banks weren’t supporting the economic recovery, with no justification. Then, asked why he didn’t just force the banks to lend, he said the central bank was doing just that, drowning finance in so much cash that the banks would eventually have to say “Uncle!” And when that didn’t sound quite right, he went back and said that behind the scenes, the Fed was using “intellectual” power to force the banks’ hand. And just in case anyone was wondering if they’d just walked into an alternate reality, he then used the words “ideas” and “Congress” in the same sentence.

Bernanke said this in a room with hundreds of economists, financiers, businessmen and pundits present. Not a single person said a thing.